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Lynn Rapoport

FILM The people in Atom Egoyan's movies have a tendency to be hiding things — pieces of their history, damages inflicted along the way, and complex motivations that are keys to our understanding of how the lives in a knotted web intersect and affect one another. We follow these expressive yet withholding characters, often back and forth through time, and collect subjective and fractional versions of the truth. Read more »

Ominously set in New York City during the summer of 2001, Remember Me, starring Robert Pattinson (of the Twilight series) and Emilie de Ravin (of TV's Lost), pretty much answers the question of whether it’s still too soon to make the events of September 11 the subject of a date movie.

FILM It's 1937, and New York City, like the rest of the nation, presumably remains in the grip of the Great Depression. That trifling historical detail, however, is upstaged in Richard Linklater's Me and Orson Welles (adapted from the novel by Robert Kaplow) by the doings at the newly founded Mercury Theatre. Read more »

The forests are in flames, the desert is advancing, the glaciers have vanished, and in a solar-powered facility towering above the ice-free waters of the Arctic, some 800 miles north of Norway, a solitary older man (Pete Postlethwaite) roams the hallways of the Global Archive, a warehouse sheltering banks of data-storage servers, a civilization's worth of art and invention, and a Noah's ark of extinguished species. From this lonely outpost, he gravely explores a stomach-churning inquiry: "We could have saved ourselves. But we didn't. It's amazing. Read more »

Involving no catatonic housewives, no mortally botched abortions, and no luminous pools of blood in the kitchen either, Sam Mendes' latest film presents a somewhat happier tale of domesticity than 1999's American Beauty or last year's Revolutionary Road, if "tale of domesticity" is a fair description for a road movie in which the stated goal is a home.

The stillness inhabiting Bay Area director Frazer Bradshaw's Everything Strange and New is broken periodically by the sounds of familial battle and the bemused, unemotive back-and-forth of a trio of men perplexed by the circumstances they have drifted into. Read more »

REVIEW If comparisons between Bertrand Normand's Ballerina and Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine's 2005 Ballets Russes are inevitable, it's perhaps mostly indicative of how infrequently a feature-length ballet documentary gets made and distributed. Then again, one could argue that the stark differences in subject and scope are historically significant. Read more »

REVIEW In Nikita Mikhalkov's Oscar-winning 1994 film Burnt by the Sun, set in the Stalin-era Soviet Union, a character corrects himself in addressing his companions as gentlemen, saying, "Excuse me, comrades." A reverse correction signals the changed times in 12, where Mikhalkov takes up a more modern, post-Soviet tale, using a familiar framework to tell it. Read more »

If a road movie has car trouble and gets stuck in an unnamed town  say, somewhere deep in the Pacific Northwest  what we are mostly trained by our moviegoing résumé to see is a setup: for a lesson about small-town life, for a tangle with zombies, for an episode of boy meets girl. Read more »